Re: another perspective on renames.

From: Paul Jackson <pj@engr.sgi.com>
Date: Apr 15, 2005, 05:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20050414221626.10c6c0e7.pj@engr.sgi.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.61.0504141759440.7261@cag.csail.mit.edu>

Scott wrote:

> Anyway, maybe it's worth thinking a little about an SCM in which this is a 
> feature, instead of (or in addition to) automatically assuming this is a 
> bug we need to add infrastructure to work around.

Agreed.

To me, the main purpose in tracking renames is to obtain a deeper history of the line-by-line changes in a file.

  ==> But that doesn't seem relevant here.

Last I looked, git has no such history. A given file contents is the indivisable atom of the git world, with no fine structure.

This is quite unlike classic SCM's, built on file formats that track source lines, not files, as the atomic unit.

To me, rename is a special case of the more general case of a big chunk of code (a portion of a file) that was in one place either being moved or copied to another place.

I wonder if there might be someway to use the tools that biologists use to analyze DNA sequences, to track the evolution of source code, identifying things like common chunks of code that differ in just a few mutations, and presenting the history of the evolution, at selectable levels of detail.

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